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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny